IEEE's Technology Winners & Losers of 2006

eldavojohn writes "As far as technologies go, there are clear winners and clear losers. This month's IEEE Spectrum issue contains an interesting list of winners and losers from 2006. Among the winners are a new radio technology, IP phone networks & memory technologies along with ethanol from sugarcane. Among the losers are tongue vision, LEDs in clothes, a flying car and ethanol from corn."

Comments

Brazil in the news...

[ulzeraj]

Nice to see "The Omnivorous Engine" in TA. There are a lot of brilliant minds here.
Ethanol is cheap and it's very common here.

The only problem comes from the use of natural gas, since most of it comes from Bolivia, and we're having some problems with their new government claiming that Petrobras (government-owned Brazilian oil) has no right over their natural gas.

And of course... we're also self-sufficiency in petroleum. :)

Winner: Multicore

[tcopeland]

The blurb on parallel constructs is well said. This has been said on Slashdot before, but with more and more computers getting multicore CPUs, it behooves us to figure out ways to get apps to use multiple threads of execution.

We can do this by multithreading in a single process, which the latest release of PMD does. This is kind of complicated, although using a good concurrency library certainly helps. Or we can separate concerns, like moving the user interface into a separate process like we do with indi. Either way, no sense in leaving CPU power on the table...

Re:Virtual chickens

[Aladrin]

You know what's even dumber? He's so impressed with his 'chicken ai' because he can run 16k of them... But games like Ninety Nine Nights have a LOT more complicated AI, and they already run many hundreds to a few thousand at a time, while dealing with sound, input and graphical output on a massive scale. I think he aimed quite low at only 16k chickens.